The Hansom Wheels met at Damon’s in the Vista on April 22. Thirteen people attended; we’d had twenty-four at the previous meeting, in February. Perhaps the drop-off in attendance resulted from my threatening in the April issue to have anybody who showed up without reservations shot. You people should know by now that almost anything printed in The Pink ’Un is either a joke or a lie.

      SpokesMan Cap’n Billy Rawl was among those who did not attend, so Program Chairman Bob Robinson announced that the game was afoot, led the toast to the woman, and had the good taste to select your Editor to administer the Musgrave Ritual.

      Bob’s Happy Hour Posers and Canonical Cryptogram were included in the April Pink ’Un. For those of you who did not come to the meeting, here are the answers to the Posers: (1) “NATO Seas” = The Alliance Main = “The Lion’s Mane” (the assigned story for the meeting); (2) “Popeye the Sailor” = “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (you know how Popeye always talks out of the side of his mouth); (3) “Jack the Ripper in Drag” = “The Veiled Lodger” (the 1927 Hitchcock movie The Lodger was about the Ripper); and (4) “A Dozen Insidious Inches” = “The Devil’s Foot.” The cryptogram, a quotation from “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” was deciphered as “I had given myself up entirely to that soothing life of nature for which I had so often yearned during those long years spent amid the gloom of London.”

      The Official Canonical Quiz on “The Lion’s Mane” was created and presented by Wayne Scott; we didn’t have advance access to it, as we usually do, and it was hard. Some of the questions were similar to the Posers, in that we were sup-posed to get the answers by figuring out clues in the form of puns, only here the answers were names of characters from the story rather than titles of adventures: e.g., “An anti-heap of angelic messengers with a final syllable suggesting the past tense, feminine form of a serpent’s vocalization.” As the late Gary Coleman used to say, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?!”      I didn’t even understand the question, let alone get the answer. Anyway, it turned out to be “Herald (angels) stack (as opposed to heap) her ssst (a female snake’s hiss)” = “Harold Stackhurst”! Whew!

      The Featured Presentation was a DVD of a February 22, 1955 live telecast of Sting of Death, with Boris Karloff as “Mr. Mycroft,” an elderly English beekeeper who catches a murderer. Of course, we all know who he was really. I enjoyed it except for the beginning, where Karloff’s dog was stung to death by the murderer’s killer bees. I hate to see animals hurt, even when, as in this case, no real dog was involved.

      Bernard Manning recited Vincent Starrett’s Sacred Sonnet, “221-B,” and we all went out into the Congaree Vista and got mugged.